1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a method for synthesizing glucaric acid, which can be used as a raw material for adipic acid, from aldohexose obtained from plants or marine resources.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Due to continuous increase in population and development of industry, oil resources are the resources mankind is most dependent to the extent that it occupies 95% of the currently produced chemicals. However, the limitation of oil deposits and the inevitable environmental problems caused by extracting such deposits, it is urgent to establish an alternative.
Hence, recently, various alternative materials capable of replacing oil resources are actively studied, and above all, since biomass which is derived from plant resources repeatedly produced annually in nature such as corn, sugar cane, wood-based plant resources, palm, algae, etc. is eco-friendly as well as reproducible, it has emerged as an important future resource.
However, the bio material business is still a small business, and also the economy is lower than petrochemical materials. But, according to the report by EPNOE (European Polysaccharide Network of Excellence) and announced by Utretcht University of Netherlands, it predicts that the usage of biomass is rapidly increased after 10 years and concretely, it is marketable to the extent that it can replace 90% of oil-extracting materials.
On the other hand, the industrial importance of the biomass related study has been increasingly emphasized in terms of automotive component materials deeply associated with oil resources. For example, polypropylene, nylon, polycarbonate, and ABS materials, etc. are used as an interior and exterior injection molding material, polypropylene material of them is most widely used in quantity, followed by nylon material (around about 15 kg per vehicle). In particular, because Nylon 66 of the nylon materials has excellent physical properties such as heat resistance, wear resistance, and chemical resistance, etc., it is widely used as the component requiring high temperature characteristics of automotive components next to Nylon 6.
Nylon 66 is prepared by dehydration polymerization of hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid. The adipic acid monomer has been produced by chemical synthesis process in which cyclohexane is obtained from crude oil refinement process, starting from crude oil, as an intermediate (e.g., crude oil→benzene→cyclohexane→adipic acid→Nylon 66). However, the above described technology and process of manufacturing adipic acid from crude oil is susceptible to problems such as the instability of oil price, the use of benzene which is a toxic material, the occurrence of environmental pollution by-products and the like. Moreover, recently, due to rising oil price, the price of chemical intermediate materials are rising, e.g., the material which is highly risen is butadiene which is the raw material of petroleum-based ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene resin) and adipic acid which is to be the raw material of Nylon 66 resin. That is, the adipic acid is prepared via the intermediate cyclohexane, and the price of the cyclohexane consistently is rising.
Accordingly, if the production technology of nylon raw material having high availability, for example, is changed to a biomass based process, economic benefits would be expected and substantial effects can be expected in terms of an environmental aspect due to the reduction of environmental pollution.
However, the manufacturing process technology using biomass as a raw material is not established, and moreover, the bio-manufacturing process technology for synthesizing adipic acid which is a monomer of nylon 66 from biomass is just at the R&D level so far, it is not commercialized.
Thus, the development of a new bio-synthesis technology capable of manufacturing adipic acid at a low cost is urgently required.
On the other hand, as the currently known bio-technology, a producing method derived from green algae is disclosed in Korean patent application No. 10-2011-0073628. The method relates to a method for manufacturing D-glucaric acid by using green algae sugars, and more particularly a method for changing D-glucuronic acid obtained from a green algae primitive to D-glucaric acid by using the recombinant microorganism introducing the glucaric acid production gene. However, although this method has the characteristics which is a new fermentation process for manufacturing a chemical having a high industrial value by using the green algae resources, it is not used industrially because the manufacturing process is complicated, e.g., it is performed by a diastatic technique involving preparing a monosaccharide from green algae primitive and the subsequent monosaccharide engineering step for manufacturing glucaric acid using the recombinant microorganism.
Further, Moon, T. S. et al. (2009) Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 75:589-595 disclose the example which produces biomass-derived D-glucaric acid by using D-glucose as a raw material. However, the existing study producing glucaric acid by using D-glucose has the disadvantage of which the productivity is very low as compared with the injected glucose amount, because D-glucaric acid is produced through the chain enzyme reaction such as PPS (phosphoenolpyruvate-dependent phosphotransferase system), myo-inositol-1-phosphate synthase, phosphatase, myo-inositol oxygenase, myo-inositol oxygenase, etc. in Colon bacillus (<17.4%)